iOS 11 is on the horizon and the sunset for 32-bit apps is on the verge. You may have heard or read from other websites that iOS 11 is on the way and it’s bringing the four horsemen with it. That’s right, the apocalypse is at hand for 32-bit apps on iOS and that means nearly 200,000 apps are likely to drop dead. Big bad Apple is going to rip your babies out of your arms and sacrifice them to the 64-bit gods. Okay, that’s dramatic and so are the headlines trying to scare you into thinking you could wake up in the morning with a good chunk of your apps gone.
Listen, I’m not saying you may not see an oddball app get the 64-bit guillotine but the data speaks for itself. Only 8% of apps on the AppStore are still sitting on a 32-bit platform. Yes, some of them have become popular over the years but the majority will likely never be missed.
Even the ones who still have a “loyal” following haven’t been updated in years, which means the developers have pretty much given up on them and moved on. Apple has given fair warning to all AppStore developers that they’d be moving away from 32-bit support and encouraging app updates to 64-bit. Developers have had plenty of time to get their ducks in a row and update their apps and (as the chart shows) 92% of apps have updated to 64-bit.
This means all of the apps you currently have on your phone will most likely continue to work just fine on iOS 11. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, Google+, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube… you get the idea. Now, you may run across an app next time you’re in iTunes and want to sync it to your iPhone for old time sake and find it won’t work. Well, that’s technology for you, developers have to keep up with the platform and update if they want their apps to continue to work. So just don’t buy into the “app-ocalypse” hype, it’s really not going to be that dramatic.
Comments are closed.